Canada needs to seize the green energy opportunity

The world’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector is in need of a green energy provider, and, according to Mohamed Cheriet, spokesperson for the GreenStar Network (GSN) project, that’s where Canada has the potential to make its mark.

Cheriet, a Professor in the Department of Synchromedia at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal, gave an overview of the GSN project at the CANARIE Annual General Meeting (AGM) held on Tuesday, June 21. The virtual AGM was videoconferenced across four sites using CANARIE’s advanced network and the GSN. Cybera’s Calgary facility was one of the broadcast locations, joining Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver.

Cheriet showed a map plotting 2,000 datacentres in the world. Of those, he said that half are based in the United States (US), 57 in Canada, and the rest are spread around the world. These centres are one of the ICT sector’s largest energy consumers. As more and more research organizations, institutions and businesses of all sizes turn to cloud, virtualization and remote storage as data solutions, the reliance on ICT — and the amount of greenhouse gases this sector produces — is expected to grow. Currently, Cheriet noted, the ICT industry in the US accounts for 8% of its national power consumption. The carbon dioxide produced from that energy consumption is growing by at least 6% per year.

This is where Canada and the GSN come in.

The Calgary-based GreenStar Network node is operated by Cybera and powered by eight solar panels located on the roof of the Alastair Ross Technology Centre.

As we’ve already noted in past blogs, the GSN project draws renewable energy from five nodes across Canada. Cybera is a local partner in the project, operating the Calgary solar-powered node located on the roof of the Alastair Ross Technology Centre (pictured at right). With a global reach in mind, the GSN project has expanded overseas to host nodes in Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Iceland, and Spain. A Memorandum of Understanding has also been signed with partners in China, and one with Egypt is in the works.

Cheriet says Canada offers unique advantages which make it an ideal green energy producer. The country’s expanding investment into hydro, wind and solar resources means energy can be provisioned at a low price. Access to high-speed optical network infrastructure (such as that provided by CANARIE) enables high-performance connections with major content providers, allowing for large-scale research projects and leading-edge network-enabled platforms. This has also set the stage for the GSN project to experiment with key areas of ICT operation and management technology, namely virtualization, cloud management, carbon monitoring and energy optimization. The next step, argues Cheriet, is to continue rallying and building government and industry support for adopting green IT and green energy platforms.

CANARIE, a major funder of the project, is on board with GSN’s vision.
“If we can become a leader in green IT, it creates economic advantages for all Canadians,” said Mark Roman, CANARIE President and CEO.

As CANARIE begins its mandate renewal process, the GSN is one of many funded projects that demonstrate CANARIE’s impact on advancing Canada’s digital economy strategy. Both Roman and Mark Whitmore, Chair of CANARIE’s Board of Directors, highlighted the following as priority areas for the organization’s mandate renewal:

• reach out to more Canadian users and enhance international collaborations
• incorporate emerging technologies such as cloud and wireless
• spearhead economic development and job creation

Strong collaborations remain a cornerstone to these plans, Whitmore noted, and CANARIE will continue to develop and support partnerships in Canada’s research, education and industry sectors.

So what does the upcoming year look like for you? Is green energy or some form of green IT on the horizon for your organization? Are you using Cybera’s or CANARIE’s advanced network for a project or pilot? We want to hear about it. Leave your comments below!

What could the open wireless movement learn from eduroam?

Prologue:

Welcome to my first formal blog posting.  I’ve resisted for years but recently have been getting more and more involved online and have found that blogging is the instrument of choice to respond to and propagate your personal perspective online.  Participating in the blogosphere reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s take on Social Capital so if I’m going to get in on it, I might as well jump in with both feet.  Let the fun and games begin and I hope I provoke some interesting discussion because isn’t that what blogging is all about?  Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back for more. Now on with the show…

What Could the Open Wireless Movement Learn from Eduroam?

As I was reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) article bemoaning the loss of open access points  across the land I was struck by how closely it tracked the final chase scene  in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s the one where Ferris is running home but going through people’s back yards as the quick way to get home.  If you are looking for your dose of 80s flashback, here’s the clip

That’s what I think using someones access point uninvited is like…a little exciting, but really crosses into  someones private space (that’s why people build fences, right?) but the shortcut accomplishes your goal at the sacrifice of someones privacy and rights.   As a scene in the movie, it’s great, Ferris gets home but is it really like that in reality? Are open wireless points free game for those who walk by?  As enticing as it is, the risk of transiting someone’s wi-fi ranks up there with don’t talk to strangers and don’t hitchhike: you never know what trouble you are going to get into.

What caught my eye though was the exclamation of “We need WiFi that is open and encrypted at the same time!” and immediately thought of the eduroam service that is part of the Canadian Access Federation .  How does this let you get online? If your institution participates with eduroam there are two main elements.  Allowing access to other eduroam participants and in return you have access to the others participants network.  To do this, you need to have an 802.1x ready wi-fi network and RADIUS as an available technology to support the eduroam SSID.  To use the service you connect with your network_id@your_institution_here.com and you are signed in through the use of chained RADIUS proxy servers.  The simplicity of this is that ANYWHERE you see eduroam, the experience is the same.  In fact, in most cases, you will have signed in automatically  anytime you open your laptop or even walk by with your smartphone, it will connect and you are online.  This has happened to me numerous times.  My favorite was when arriving at the Internet2 spring members meeting hotel and not even checked in at 11pm at night, my phone was already online with eduroam.  No fuss no muss, it just works.

So how prevalent is this in Canada?  Well at the time of writing the AUCC folks  say there are 95 universities registered and 27 of them or 28%  are participating in the Canadian Access Federation which operate the Canadian eduroam presence. Europe coverage is even higher.

In the US there are approximately the same number of sites live (27 according to the map at the time of writing) and another 20 or so more either interested or actively testing out of thousands of universities.  It is hard to explain why the uptake is not as big as Canada or elsewhere.  It can have something to do with being 802.1x ready or maybe it is just not rated high enough priority.  It’s hard to say.

Membership has its privileges.

With eduroam, reciprocity is a big part of the service and has a lot of benefits.  The active Ids inyour system have the ability to roam to other institutions but when someone comes to yours, you don’t have to provision them to get on the network. Opening the laptop really equates to getting online and there’s nothing more satisfying to a traveller that to being able to get online without having to follow some 7 and a half step process to signing in. I was recently at the TERENA conference which had great eduroam coverage and never used my termporary id.  The TERENA conference had 500+ people, 800+ devices connected via eduroam (one person has both a laptop and smartphone/ipad) and had >10,000 authentications over 5 days.

At a recent TERENA conference, hundreds of attendees used eduroam and their home credentials and could ignore the temporary userid/password. 

What about security you ask? Eduroam uses 802.1x and WPA2 protocols and your credential is verified at the home institution.  As for what the acceptable use policies (AUPs) are, as the visitor your are expected to abide by your home institutions and the one in which you are a visitor to.  It is all authenticated using your identity so transiting the network is permitted, but not anonymously.

So can just anyone sign up to be on eduroam?  In short, no.  it is geared to higher education institutions and there is a reciprocity balance to be struck.  It is plausible that if one location were to not participate according to the community’s expectations that branch (aka country root server) could be orphaned from the eduroam trust-framework.

Coming full circle, what does this mean to the EFF plea for technology? Is eduroam for them?  Possibly, but unlikely.  Whoever implements wouldn’t even come close to meeting eligibility and then there’s this hard question to answer of whose password store to authenticate against.  I can see the eduroam technique being duplicated much like the dynamic DNS folks who are now found in the actual routers firmware.  So, in theory, you could enable this  ’feature at your convenience as a personal decision to contribute bandwidth to the common good’.  There are still a bunch of challenges to overcome to meet the EFF free wifi service: administration, findability, getting the word out, does it violate your AUP with your internet provider all come to mind. At the end of the day though it needs to be ubiquitous,  something that works without too much fuss, and is straightforward  for both the enduser and the access point maintainer — kind of like eduroam

Welcome to Digital Innovators

THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF CANADA’S ADVANCED NETWORK ALLIANCE

CANARIE, along with our provincial network partners, will add new content on a weekly basis, but encourage our partners to post more regularly. We want to make this a lively space for the community to discuss and debate issues affecting advanced networks and their users.

The primary goals of the advanced networks blog is to create a community of advanced network users, developers, visionaries and champions, together with an online space where they can share information and discuss issues affecting the community. Our audience is anyone with an interest in advanced networks – their future direction, uses, benefits, developments in Canada and internationally – that means you!